The world’s best fighting games are built for the world’s best fighting game players. That’s not to say it’s impossible to make a fighting game for everyone, but Marvel vs. Capcom 3 isn’t it. Capcom’s fifth Superheroes Versus Pixels punch-up is for those who don’t care and for those who care too much, and everyone else be damned.

It’s a game of three-on-three tag-team fighting with a roster of almost forty fighters drawn from Capcom’s video games and Marvel’s comics. It’s a chance to throw Spiderman and the Hulk up against Chun Li and Viewtiful Joe, as well as a chance to spend months learning multi-tag mid-air combos which look and sound like the end of the world. If you’re among the world’s best it’s a game about constructing the most aggressive and complex offence imaginable and hitting your opponent with it as hard and as fast as you can.

Complex is good. Complex means your opponent will struggle to read your combo and break it; with only four attack buttons, mid-air combos can be easy to read. You’ll loft your opponent skywards with a launcher, follow them with a tap of the joystick, hit them a few times then exchange with someone else on your team who’ll continue the assault. With each exchange you’ll drag them higher, bounce them off the ground, or juggle them at the same height. If your opponent anticipates your intentions in Marvel vs. Capcom’s version of Rock, Paper, Scissors they can break the combo and put you back to square one.

If you’re among the world’s best MVC3 is an exercise in stick mastery and expert timing and all-out aggression which makes for an impressive show in the hands of players who can keep up.

But that probably isn’t you. Maybe, instead, you’re the exact opposite of that. Maybe you’ll just thrash buttons and have fun watching Spidey batter Chun Li. And that’s okay too. Like Tekken and Soul Calibur, MVC3 is good at making exciting things happen in the most exciting fashion every time you press a button. The game’s lightest jabs explode from fighters’ fists like hand grenades; its biggest moves are easily executed fill the screen with an Olympic Opening Ceremony’s worth of spectacle.

You don’t need the forty-hit multi-exchange combo to look good, and if mashing buttons is good enough for you then it’s good enough for Marvel vs. Capcom. It sees what you’re thinking and it likes where you’re going and it’ll do its best to get you there.

The problem exists far below the best of the best but somewhere above those happy to mash. If you want depth without total dedication Marvel vs. Capcom is the least supportive fighter imaginable.

We had twenty years to learn Street Fighter’s ancient mechanics and by sticking to that formula everyone got a head start on Street Fighter IV, but MVC3 is a fresh start for a series already firmly entrenched in the diamond hard end of the hardcore space. It’s a game built for amateurs or experts, not for otherwise halfway-decent players who can only squeeze in an hour or two’s play on an evening.

The game has a learning curve which is less a curve and more a brick wall you’ll run into at high speed the first time you take the game online and find everything you thought you knew was wrong. Typical middle-of-the-road players can spend weeks looking like they've never played a video game before in MVC3 but at least they’ll still look brilliant, albeit in an uncoordinated fashion.